Class (32 page)

Her garden would really be quite lovely if only she could stop the gardener, who comes two hours a week, planting tulip bulbs in serried ranks like the ones outside Buckingham Palace. But if she checks him she’s terrified he’ll take offence and not turn up next week.

Gideon and Samantha sit in their garden on a Sunday morning, swilling back the chilled wine saying, ‘This is the life!’ and watching the half-leg of lamb rotating jerkily on the barbecue, wafting intimations of garlic, rosemary and envy into the nearby council estate.

THE SUBURBS

‘Ewbank’d inside and Atco’d out, the English suburban residence and the garden which is an integral part of it stand trim and lovingly cared for in the mild sunshine. Everything is in it’s place. The leaves of the Virginia creeper which climbs the rough-cast wall just below the best bedroom hardly stir.

J.M. Richards

The Castles on the Ground

Nothing has really changed in the suburbs. When we lived in a working-class part of Fulham no one minded that we never bothered with our garden. A few neighbours grew vegetables and fought a losing battle with visiting torn cats, but the rest of us let the weeds flourish and chucked our beer cans and spare-rib bones over each other’s fences when we ran out of dustbin space. Only when we moved to Putney, a Madam Butterfly land of cherry trees and flowering shrubs, and inherited a beautifully kept garden which we promptly let go to rack and ruin, did we discover that gardening here was taken very seriously indeed. Soon the whole street were clicking their tongues over our hayfield of a lawn and making cracks about calling in the Forestry Commission to deal with the weeds. Finally a kindly neighbour could bear it no longer and found a gardener to come in three hours a week and sort us out.

More recently the local Conservation Association, which howls with protest if so much as a harebell is touched on the common, produced stern proposals, which were circularized round the district, for tidying up the garden of the only house along the common that happened to be owned by the council. This, they felt, was letting down the tone of the road by the number of weeds. At any minute one expected the dandelion detector van to be policing the streets bleeping noisily outside offending gardens. My husband suggested it would be far cheaper to declare the garden in question an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty; then the weeds and wild flowers could riot unimpeded.

Though Putney is more upper-middle than suburban, the idea of not letting down the street is shared by the suburbs further out. Few people there are dedicated gardeners in the winter. Unlike the upper classes, they stay inside in bad weather. But, come the first temperate weekend, suburban man peers out of his window at his colourless plot and thunders off to the garden centre to load up the Volvo with bags of John Innes, bedding plants, do-it-yourself cucumber kits, and a plaster fig-leafless cherub to upstage the plastic Dolphin regurgitating blue water on the patio next door.

For the suburban gardener is deeply competitive: he doesn’t want anyone else to let down the street, so that his own glory may be greater when his garden is the best. Rivalry is particularly fierce over roses. Hybrid teas and floribundas mass in clashing colours above a totally weedless flower bed. You can’t get a lie-in at weekends either; it’s like the pits at Silverstone with the roar of all the mowers revving up, interspersed by the excruciating, teeth-grating rattle as they drive over the crazy pavement.

The patio is also a focal point, a mosaic of Italian titles, covered with plastic urns filled with striped petunias, deckchairs with foot-rests, canopies and seed-packet upholstery, and sun umbrellas bought with Green Shield stamps.

The Weybridged house has a circular gravel drive bordered by ‘rhodos’, ‘in’ and ‘out’ entrances with no gates, an up-and-over garage door, a swimming pool which, despite its barrage balloon cover, is filled in winter with dead leaves and sparrows, and a dog yard for the terriers to dry off in. Having gone one step up from the suburban garden with its high laurel hedges, Weybridged houses are often open-plan with no dividing fences at all, although there might be a hedge of conifers to shelter the roses from the wind, or interlaced larch fencing around the vegetable garden. Here Howard and Eileen sit in their summer house admiring the well-tended lawn with its crazy-paving stepping stones, the conifers and golden willow in their little circles of earth, the beautifully kept shrubberies full of pampas grass and bamboo, and the thrushes pecking at the rack-of-lamb bone, which hangs from the dovecote (pronounced dovecoat: Harry Stow-Crat says dovec’t). A heavily ferned stream flows under a wooden, willow-pattern bridge and over a waterfall by the heaths in the rock garden. Heather, except on the moors, is considered very vulgar by Harry Stow-Crat. Even its Latin name,
erica
, sounds frightfully common.

On Monday, aping the upper classes, Eileen Weybridge feels it her duty to pick up the litter dropped by trippers in the nearby beechwoods before she goes out to bridge or a Conservative coffee morning.

Believing that upper-class women spend their leisure hours doing the flowers, the Weybridges are heavily into flower arrangement by numbers, ramming salmon-pink ‘glads’ into green foam blocks, so that they stand up in the plastic ‘dole-phin’ vase and pick up the apricot décor in the lounge.

Yellow ‘chrysanths’ and button dahlias have always been a talking point too, when arranged in the white basket held by a naked cupid on the dining-room table when Howard’s business associates come to dinner. While the orchids Howard raised in the ‘
con
serve-a-tory’ (the Stow-Crats say ‘c’n
serv
’tri’) look so well in driftwood in the vestibule. The expression ‘fresh flowers’, to distinguish them from dried or plastic flowers, is also very Weybridge.

Although Jen Teale lives in a house with a number, she has re-named it ‘JenBry’ which combines both her and Bryan’s names; she puts it in inverted commas on her notepaper. This drives the postman crackers. Her wrought-iron gate also incorporates the name. On either side Bryan has built a bright yellow wall, shaped like a doily. A plastic flowerpot container, filled with purple and shocking pink petunias, hangs by the mauve front door. Jen remembers to remove the dead heads night and morning. There are no creepers up the house. Jen doesn’t want earwigs in the bath. Most of the back and front gardens have been crazy-paved by Bryan because it looks so much neater, but there are a few crescent-shaped flower beds which might have been dug out by a pastry cutter. Here in neat rows in the spring stand military lines of blue grape hyacinths, yellow ‘daffs’ and scarlet tulips. In the summer these are replaced by white alyssum, French marigolds, Oxford blue lobelia and scarlet geraniums, or, by way of a change, calceolarias and salvias. Jen loves bedding plants because, once they’ve finished flowering, they can be thrown away. There is not a weed in sight. The garden is oblong, regular and compact like a park garden. When Bryan is not in his toolshed, he tends his ‘chrysanths’ and his ‘toms’ in the greenhouse. It’s better than being hoovered under. Occasionally on summer afternoons Jen and the family sit out on tubular steel picnic chairs that can fold away neatly afterwards. There was a nasty moment once when an ‘elderly relative come to visit’ got stuck in the couch hammock with aluminium frames. Harry Stow-Crat ties hammocks to trees.

‘For God’s sake pull the plug out!’

As a first-generation gardener, Mr Nouveau-Richards pulls out all the stops. Apart from lighting up his tarmac drive and technicolour lawn with toadstools, he has all his flowerbeds floodlit and coolie-hat lamps stationed like street lights round the garden.

Weeding, watering and edging is all done by electricity, which also keeps the earth warm under the cloches. In the propagating frames all-night fluorescent lighting forces tulips into bloom in November, and vast strawberries to ripen in time for Christmas. Plastic grass lines the outdoor swimming pool which is constantly kept at 80° like the indoor one.

Mr. N-R reclines on the underfloor-heated ‘pate-io’ and plays with a computerized mowing machine, a new toy just imported from Texas. He has just mixed a mint julep from his portable drinks trolley which glides over tiles and shag-pile and was described in the catalogue as ‘the ultimate way to enjoy a cocktail on the patio, an aperitif by the pool, or those after-dinner drinks in the lounge’.

Mr Definitely-Disgusting hasn’t got a garden, but he grows tomatoes and geraniums on his balcony, and he also has an allotment, which means a lot to him. It is illegal to sell ‘produce’ (a very Jen Teale word) from one’s allotment, but at least he can grow vegetables for all the family. Here stand neat furrows of potatoes, curtains of runner beans, rows of lettuces and ‘collys’ and, at the end, a blaze of annuals and bedding plants in primary colours to rival Samantha Upward’s playroom. When Mr D-D pulls up a lettuce he calls it ‘picking a salad’.

12   FOOD

LET THEM EAT GÂTEAU

‘When a woman asks for back, I call her “madam”,’ said a grocer. ‘When she asks for streaky I call her “dear”. You can always tell the gentry,’ he went on, ‘by their knowledge of cheese. They don’t have trouble saying the foreign names.’

The food you eat often indicates what class you are. The way you eat it, namely your table manners, does so almost more. The upper classes, for example, don’t have any middle-class inhibitions about waiting until everyone else is served: they start eating the moment food is put in front of them. This stems from the days when they all dined at long refectory tables and if you waited for fifty other people to be served, your wild boar would be stone cold. Nor would Harry Stow-Crat comment on the food at a dinner party, because one doesn’t congratulate one’s hostess on something one expects to be done perfectly in any case.

The ritual of table napkins is interesting. The working-class man tucked a handkerchief under his chin to protect his shirt and waistcoat (he would never eat in a coat.) The lower-middles, daintily thinking ‘napkin’ sounded too much like babies’ nappies and wanting to show off their knowledge of French, called it a serviette. The middle classes, wanting to go one up, talked about napkins, but, being frugal, also wanted them to last a few days, so they introduced napkin rings. The upper classes, who had plenty of people to do the laundry (Harry Stow-Crat’s mother calls it ‘larndry’), had clean napkins at every meal and regarded napkin rings as the height of vulgarity. One peer, when presented with a pair in a velvet box, had to ask the mayor what they were for before embarking on his speech of thanks. Even today Caroline Stow-Crat would rather use paper napkins than napkin rings. Mrs Nouveau-Richards, having read in some etiquette book that the word ‘serviette’ is common, calls them “s-napkins’. In the same way, she only just remembers in time that dinner in the middle of the day is called lunch, and talks about ‘d’lunch’, which sounds faintly West Indian. Harry Stow-Crat’s mother still calls it luncheon.

Both Harry and Gideon Upward would lunch from one o’clock onwards, have tea around four and dinner at eight to eight-thirty in the evening. The Teales would breakfast very early because they don’t like to be rushed, so would the Definitely-Disgustings because Mr D-D has to get to work early. Both Bryan and Mr D-D probably have a cheese roll or a bar of chocolate at nine-thirty, followed by ‘dinner’ at twelve and ‘tea’ the moment they get home from work about six to six-thirty.

The worst thing about the lower classes, complains Caroline Stow-Crat, is that they never know when to leave. If she asks them round for a quick pre-dinner drink, they’ve always had their tea first and are all set to carry on drinking until midnight. Samantha Upward gets round the problem by asking Mrs Nouveau-Richards at seven, then lies and says she’s frightfully sorry but she and Gideon have got to go out to dinner at eight-thirty. Unfortunately Mrs N-R spoils everything by asking if she can see the kitchen and discovers three large baked potatoes and a casserole cooking in the oven. Samantha stands on one leg and says: